Wednesday, February 25, 2009

On Feb 24, 2009, I believe I almost fell off an increasingly flat world.

It started late in the afternoon when students in our missionary society at St. Christopher's School, were engaged in a video skype session with Toorak College in Australia about the bushfires in Victoria. However, before the session started, @jennyluca and I struggled to get our skype connection up and running. As we continued to try and get skype to function, we utilized Twitter to post our status to each other should the connection fail. Well, someone was looking out for us because right before our planned start time, skype started working.

So how did it go?

Words cannot describe what a wonderful opportunity it was for our boys to hear firsthand from our Aussie friends. All of the speakers from Toorak did such a fabulous job in conveying the situation in Victoria that I believe our boys were able to take in the true essence of the magnitude of the catastrophe.

On a purely educational slant, there were many cross curricular items that our boys were able to glean.

Word choice and spelling-English spelling versus American English taken from Australian Newpapers

Time zone differences-Toorak was a day ahead and we spoke to them at 8am to our 4pm

Use of the metric system: celsius for temp, km for distance, mm for rainfall. I used to teach science

Geography

Biomes

Wildlife: gotta love the question about comparing deer to kangaroos

Flora

Now what?

Our missionary society is now brainstorming all sorts of ideas on how they can best be a part of the global effort to help those in need. When their work is complete, I will follow up.

It really is a holy time of year in the christian calendar.

It was Ash Wednesday when we spoke to Toorak yesterday and today it is Ash Wednesday for us.

Monday, February 23, 2009

After reading Jenny Luca's post about the bush fires in Victoria, I felt the need to pull together our boys and I thought it would be a wonderful opportunity for our boys to hear first hand from our Aussie friends and see if there was anything we could do as a school. My call to action started by discussing the possibilities of holding a video Skype session with the missionary society officers from our lower, middle, and upper schools at St. Christopher's School and with the students of Toorak College.

But in the true spirit of PLP , why should our effort be limited by just using skype for our 2 schools! Join us this Tuesday, February 24 @ 4pm Eastern Standard Time and 8.00am Pacific Eastern Standard time. Watch via ustream.tv as the students from both of our schools discuss the needs of the area and speak with a member of the Toorak community who lost a home.